The problem is, as always, real estate. If you can suggest a place to put the information that doesn't eat a lot of space, I would listen.

Have you tried '*foo' feature? Reducing the size of the tree might work better for you.

Ooooh, very nice. I wondered what on earth you were talking about until I tried it. For anyone else reading - if you put * in front of your search term it displays the treeview collapsed with just the items matching that term within it (effectively a filter). That will do the job just as well, thanks!

Quote:

Originally Posted by chaley

The tooltip for a custom item already shows you the category name as well as the average rating.

Hmmm... not for me. It just shows the average rating?

Quote:

Originally Posted by chaley

Qt has the API to collapseAll/expandAll, and I have thought about an expand-all/collapse-all option, but as usual I don't know where to put it. I am not in general a fan of right-click (people don't seem to notice that the functions are there), but that may be the right place.

How about a button just to the right of the Find? You already have a very large text area for typing Find text, hard to believe people will type expressions long enough to fill that. I would much prefer a button over a right click - less clicks for a start and as you say more discoverable. Just a teeny one the size of Advanced Search as a quick way to collapse the tree and clear the find text...

The category shows only for custom items. You might be looking at a standard one? The rationale is that the standard items can be determined from the icon, but the custom ones cannot.

If you truly are not seeing the category name in the tooltip for custom fields, then I have some debugging to do.

Haha, you can relax, it is a "standard item" (an author name). However it is inside one of my multiple user categories. That is what I cannot determine currently once the treeview is expanded - which user category that author lies within (well not without scrolling up).

Haha, you can relax, it is a "standard item" (an author name). However it is inside one of my multiple user categories. That is what I cannot determine currently once the treeview is expanded - which user category that author lies within (well not without scrolling up).

I put the current category into all tooltips. What this means is that when looking at items in a user category, you will see that user category name for all items. You will not see the custom category the item comes from. This seems reasonable to me, but I can already hear the requests to have both names there.

I also added a 'collapse button' where you suggested. I didn't add an 'expand button'. It didn't seem worth the trouble and real estate.

I would like to have a plugin that would enable me to put a frequently used option directly on a toolbar.

There is an option in Preferences -> Import / Export -> Adding books -> swap author Firstname and Lastname.
I change that option very often and it is always lots of clicks, plus I sometimes forget what is the latest setting. Another User Unfiendly feature of that panel is that the Apply button is in the top left corner, the Close button in the parent dialog is in the right left.

Another lot candidate for placing on the "Toolbar Frequently Used Options" would be 4 versions of regular expression for importing new books.

Is it possible to make such plugin? Could I make a my private version of Calibre by simply copying a little piece of code from the settings dialog to the source for the toolbar layout?

I am trying to figure out how to use this... I want to add Barnes and Nobles to it? Just can't seem to get it. Thanks for any help

You can take a look at this post in this thread - iandix posted his configuration (and icons) for B&N, GoodReads & ISBN.

As that was posted with an older version of this plugin that did not have the encoding or keyboard shortcut parameters you would want to add those columns in. So it would look like this if you added his items exactly with the icon:

Take the attached image below, and save it on your PC. Follow the instructions within the readme.txt in the plugin zip file for exactly where to place it. They are also printed in the Calibre help manual.

I put the current category into all tooltips. What this means is that when looking at items in a user category, you will see that user category name for all items. You will not see the custom category the item comes from. This seems reasonable to me, but I can already hear the requests to have both names there.

I also added a 'collapse button' where you suggested. I didn't add an 'expand button'. It didn't seem worth the trouble and real estate.

Thanks chaley, that tooltip sounds great. Agree with you on the expand button - I couldn't think of a use case for it. The only situation you "might" want one would be when you fo a seach using the *foo filter syntax but that is still a rare occurrence to not justify losing more screen real estate imho.

The last comment I would have about that expand button is whether its function should actually be similar to the "reset search" button next to the search bar for the books. In that it both collapses the tree and clears the find text. I'm ok with it either way but just raising it for consideration if you had not already.

I would like to have a plugin that would enable me to put a frequently used option directly on a toolbar.

There is an option in Preferences -> Import / Export -> Adding books -> swap author Firstname and Lastname.
I change that option very often and it is always lots of clicks, plus I sometimes forget what is the latest setting. Another User Unfiendly feature of that panel is that the Apply button is in the top left corner, the Close button in the parent dialog is in the right left.

At first when not reading this properly I thought you meant the edit metadata dialog to swap names after the import but I understand now on re-reading it. I guess the question I would have would be how you would visually show what option you have selected. I guess perhaps a split button dropdown with a toggle on the menu option and displaying a tickmark next to it would be a conventional approach?

Quote:

Originally Posted by kacir

Another lot candidate for placing on the "Toolbar Frequently Used Options" would be 4 versions of regular expression for importing new books.

Yes I do believe it is an area for "enhancement" on the preferences dialog, I could not understand why there was not at least a history dropdown on there when I first started using Calibre. However continually clicking all the way into the dialog to make a change before adding books would be too painful - your suggestion of toolbar access sounds better. However as each "button" would have to be a separate plugin I think you would be better writing a single plugin button with a split dropdown (like the Add button has). You could assign keyboard shortcuts too. If making it available to others you would want to offer some way to configure the regex options - ideally via the plugin preferences dialog. Only downside would be requiring a Calibre restart each time you add/remove an option (rebuilding the menus only occurs at Calibre startup) but given how infrequently you would do that I think it is acceptable. It might even be possible to get around that, just that it hasn't "been done" yet within Calibre I have seen.

What I do is use a tool to rename the files before adding to Calibre so they always match my regex but if you want to avoid that I can see this as a popular solution.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kacir

Is it possible to make such plugin? Could I make a my private version of Calibre by simply copying a little piece of code from the settings dialog to the source for the toolbar layout?

I believe both the above could be done quite elegantly as plugins. So you would not need to actually modify the source code of Calibre and "have a private version".

If you want to write these yourself, go for it. If you want me to do them for you I'm happy to do so, on holiday at the moment so thumb twiddling...

EDIT: Ok, I couldn't resist. I'm working on writing this for you. I will combine all the requirements into one button. Basically it will let you change any of the adding preferences by clicking on the toolbar dropdown menu button, so the three checkbox options that are there now, plus the ability to switch between up to 4 user configurable regular expressions. We'll see how it goes...

Last edited by kiwidude; 01-01-2011 at 09:01 PM.
Reason: Further comments

This plugin provides a way to quickly switch between certain preferences values without going into the preferences dialog. Specifically it currently caters for preferences related to adding books but could be added to in future if needed. This gives you a toolbar button (see screenshot below) which allows you to:

Switch between up to four customisable regular expressions for file patterns

Displayed as user friendly menu names, but the full regex is visible in the status bar at bottom of Calibre as you hover over the menu item.

Toggle the checked status of the three other options related to adding books that exist in the preferences dialog currently

Customise which menu options are included on the dropdown

Customise keyboard shortcuts for all of the above

Rebuilds the menu options after configuration changes without the need to restart Calibre (yay!)

Keeps in sync with changes made via the Preferences dialog

Includes a menu option to invoke the existing Preferences dialog from the menu.

Many users like myself prefer to rename files to a single standard format before importing into Calibre. However this plugin gives you the option to quickly "switch on the fly" your settings without the drudgery of the Preferences dialog (and saving your regular expressions in Notepad!).

By default I have included two regex patterns - the default Calibre one, and a second for handling titles in "author [- optional series #] - title" format.

Special Notes:

Requires Calibre 0.7.34 or later to allow the built-in images to be retrieved from the plugin zip file automatically at run-time.

Installation Notes

Follow standard plugin installation instructions as per the first post in this thread to install, restart Calibre and add to your toolbar

To customise the plugin regular expressions and shortcuts, you can do so within the preferences dialog in the same screen you add the plugin. Expand the "User Interface Action plugins" section and select the "Quick Preferences" plugin on this list. Click the "Customise plugin" button and type the text for your alternate shortcut key combinations.

Feedback/suggestions as always welcomed.

Attached Thumbnails

Last edited by kiwidude; 01-27-2011 at 08:37 PM.
Reason: Moved to own thread

New version up now. Every time I push a plugin I wonder whether to offer it at some sort of "beta" first but any errors tend to get found pretty quickly by the likes of yourself

It took a fair bit of work to write this one but it was an interesting exercise. Slowly my knowledge of Qt is increasing as I force myself to try a few new things with each plugin. The Calibre architecture is so cool to allow this, credit again to Kovid and co.

It took a fair bit of work to write this one but it was an interesting exercise. Slowly my knowledge of Qt is increasing as I force myself to try a few new things with each plugin. The Calibre architecture is so cool to allow this, credit again to Kovid and co.

Now that I have the quick preferences icon in the toolbar it would be nice to be able to remove the default preferences icon.